Consumers can voluntarily reduce their exposure to phthalates AND the industry can be regulated. Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint.
I've been a very health/environmentally conscious consumer for 30 years, but I don't have time to keep up with every possible thing, nor do I want to be exhausting myself trying to urge other consumers to shift their buying choices ever so slightly. Expecting consumers to do everything is market fundamentalism and it's often a meme put around by industry to shirk responsibility. My environmental footprint is already way below average. I'm tired of sacrificing my life on the altar of market economics waiting for everyone else to catch up, while industry pours money in lobbying, PR, and advertising to maintain an increasingly dystopian status quo.
> Regulators aren't going to save consumers if consumers refuse to get educated or practice restraint
That's literally the job of regulators, see asbestos or cancer causing pesticides that have been banned or severely restricted. Do you expect all consumers to have degrees in chemistry and read papers to make risk assessments about the 10,000s of chemicals they come into contact daily?
Before asbestos or cancer causing pesticides were regulated, they were perfectly fine to sell and use, but they were not in fact safe for people. In most cases, regulation lags science. In quite a few cases, things we know probably aren't safe are not regulated at all, or not sufficiently regulated. Regulation has many inputs: good science is one of them, but expediency is another, and so is corruption, and frankly so is incompetence. In any case, because the regulatory status of a substance has no relationship to whether or not it will kill you, it is safest if we have good regulation AND people do as much due diligence as they are comfortable with. Ultimately, it's your health, so you have to take responsibility for it.
